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Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom

By
VIVIAN YEE

It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their
classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one
cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close
cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on
their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the
1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping
poor and minority students in low-level groups.

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country —
a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry
had all but ended its use.

A new analysis of data collected by the government’s National Assessment
of Educational Progress shows that of the fourth-grade teachers
surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability
in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. The analysis, by Tom Loveless, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that in math, 61
percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up
from 40 percent in 1996.

“These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Mr. Loveless, who first noted the returning trend
in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind
of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.”

The resurgence of ability grouping comes as New York City grapples with the state of its gifted and talented programs
— a form of tracking in some public schools in which certain students,
selected through testing, take accelerated classes together.

These programs, which serve about 3 percent of the elementary school
population, are dominated by white and Asian students.

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker who is running for mayor, has proposed expanding the number of gifted classes
while broadening the criteria for admission in hopes of increasing
diversity. (The city’s Education Department has opposed the proposal,
saying that using criteria other than tests would dilute the classes.)

Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has
become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of
ability and achievement.

When Jill Sears began teaching elementary school in New Hampshire 17
years ago, the second graders in her class showed up on the first day
with a bewildering mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some children
coasted through math worksheets in a few minutes, she said; others
struggled to finish half a page. The swifter students, bored, would make
mischief, while the slowest would become frustrated, give up and act
out.

“My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out
approximately two-thirds of my learners,” said Ms. Sears, a fourth-grade
teacher at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, N.H. “I didn’t like those
odds.”

So she completely reorganized her classroom. About a decade ago, instead
of teaching all her students as one group, she began ability grouping,
teaching all groups the same material but tailoring activities and
assignments to each group.

“I just knew that for me to have any sanity at the end of the day, I could just make these changes,” she said.

While acknowledging that wide variation in classrooms poses a challenge,
critics of grouping — including education researchers and civil rights
groups — argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the practice inevitably
divided students according to traits corresponding with achievement,
like race and class. Some states began recommending that schools end
grouping in the 1990s, amid concerns that teachers’ expectations for
students were shaped by the initial groupings, confining students to
rigid tracks and leading teachers to devote fewer resources to
low-achieving students.

“The kids who are thought of as the least able end up with the fewest
opportunities and resources and positive learning environments,” said
Jeannie Oakes, author of “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality,”
a popular critique of grouping. “The potential benefit is so far
outweighed by the very known and well-documented risks.”

Though the issue is one of the most frequently studied by education
scholars, there is little consensus about grouping’s effects.

Some studies indicate that grouping can damage students’ self-esteem by
consigning them to lower-tier groups; others suggest that it produces
the opposite effect by ensuring that more advanced students do not make
their less advanced peers feel inadequate. Some studies conclude that
grouping improves test scores in students of all levels, others that it
helps high-achieving students while harming low-achieving ones, and
still others say that it has little effect.

Proponents of grouping argue that without it, teachers are forced to
teach to the middle, leaving out both struggling children and gifted
learners. They also say there is a “peer effect,” in which
high-achieving children do better if paired with other high-achieving
students. Done judiciously and flexibly, they say, grouping can help all
students. The reasons for the resurgence are unclear. Some experts
attribute it to No Child Left Behind,
the 2001 law that strengthened accountability standards for schools. By
forcing teachers to focus on students who fell just below the
proficiency cutoff, the law may have encouraged teachers to group
struggling students together to prepare them for standardized tests.

Technology might have also played a role, Mr. Loveless said, with
teachers becoming more comfortable using computers to allow children to
learn at different speeds.

In interviews, several teachers said they believed modern-day grouping
was not discriminatory because the groups were constantly in flux. But
they acknowledged the additional challenge of tailoring instruction to
different groups, as they must produce multiple lesson plans and keep
closer track of students’ progress.

At Public School 156 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which enrolls mostly
African-American and Hispanic children, many living in homeless
shelters, Cathy Vail randomly sorts her fifth graders at the beginning
of the year using lettered sticks. After six weeks of testing and
observing them, she shifts them into “teams” of seven or eight.

Children may be assigned to different groups for reading and math, and
can switch groups if they have shown progress, struggle to get along
with other students in a group or need extra help with a particular
lesson. Ms. Vail uses thrice-yearly reading assessments and a test
before each math unit to make sure children do not remain in groups that
are too advanced or too slow for them, she said; one student this year,
for instance, has moved up two groups in both reading and math.

Ms. Vail teaches the same lesson, whether it is a math concept or a
book, to the entire class, but gives each group a different assignment.
Working on each week’s set of new vocabulary words, all four groups draw
illustrations and write captions using the assigned words, but she
encourages team C, her highest-achieving group, to write more complex
sentences, perhaps using two new vocabulary words in the same sentence.
She also asks children in team C to peer-teach students in the other
groups.

“At the end of the day, they’re learning the same words, but just with
different levels of complexity and nuance,” she said.

When she moves students to new groups, she tells them it is because she
can best help them there, and she believes they see the grouping
positively, she said.

“It has to be done properly — you can’t make a kid feel small because
they’re in group A,” her lowest-achieving group, she said. “If you don’t
have a stigma attached to the group, then I don’t see the problem.”

In Ms. Sears’s classroom at Woodman Elementary in Dover, the three or
four groups of students rotate throughout the day, some being taught on
the rug while others work in desk clusters. Before each unit, she groups
the 26 children based on initial assessments, takes a few days to
observe them in the smaller groups and revises the groups again,
sometimes as often as every day.

In the decimal unit, one group might learn to add decimals using blocks
they can manipulate with their hands, while another might be able to
draw the models on their own. Yet another might practice using the
algorithm for adding. The last group might be asked to analyze a word
problem and apply the calculation.

“I can really hone in on their performance and see if they need to move
up to a group that will help them access the same content in a way that
works for them,” said Ms. Sears, who refers to the technique as dynamic
grouping. “Are they an abstract learner, are they someone who needs to
draw a picture, are they someone who needs to move their body, are they
someone that likes to work alone?”

She said the minority children in her class were more or less evenly distributed among the groups.

African-American and Hispanic children make up about 15 percent of
Woodman’s population, its principal, Patrick Boodey, said. More than
half of the school’s students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
Socioeconomic factors are a stronger indicator of where a student will
end up than race, he said, with minorities spread among groups but with
many poorer children congregating in lower-tier groups and remedial
programs.

Ability grouping in reading has been a common practice at the school for
at least a decade, and more teachers are beginning to group children in
math as well, he said. The school has so embraced the practice that Ms.
Sears will go to Maine this summer to train teachers in two districts
in grouping.

“Dynamic grouping is the norm, and it’s going to continue to be,” Mr. Boodey said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: June 12, 2013
Because
of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred
incorrectly to an analysis of government statistics, and to the
statistics themselves. The statistics on grouping, which came from the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were analyzed by
Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as was
stated elsewhere in the article; NAEP did not analyze them. NAEP is run
by the National Center for Education Statistics, a census-like agency
for school statistics; NAEP itself is not a census-like agency.